Davaris
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Posts posted by Davaris
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There were a lot of people saying that the new leadwerks logo didn't look very unique
They also said the same about the last one which was a cog. However I prefered the previous one, because the image of the cog and the factory sounding name reinforced each other. Anyway I've gotten used to the new one now.
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What other suggestion could we add?
I don't know if this comes under best practices, but I had quite a bit of trouble getting shaders to work, when I was first learning to use them.
So I'd suggest a list of what frag and vert files work together, as well as a link to the wiki with a few more shader samples. I assume this is going to be a sticky topic right?
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Oh yes, I agree 100% with darrenc182. All standard libraries should be just drag&drop to the game, and not hardcoded as some stone old version into the engine. Leadwerks Engine should only do what no other library does, and be seamlessly integratable with any industrial standard libraries.
I like that Purelight is an optional add-on, since I wouldn't use it because it's not realtime, but also Newton should be optional, since real game developers want some better physics engines also, like Bullet/PhysX/Havok, as each have their own benefits for certain purposes.
Yes! While I would like to see a couple of libraries added to the engine, I don't want to pay for what I have no use for. I also don't want Josh to be distracted with this kind of work and fall behind in the race for better graphics.
The only thing Josh would need to decide if he chooses to go that way, is how it should be done. Should he hire people to write and maintain these plugins, or allow a community of plugin providers to spring up around LWs? If it was a community, then people would have to compete for customers and the standard (in theory) should be high.
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Its certainly got a creepy adult feel to it.
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Yeah, that's basically what I meant. The result of this would probably be a nice demo that no one could do anything with. I mean, it would be cool, but there are so many other areas to focus on that will go further.
Don't forget the female gamers, they like characters that seem alive and they are 51% of the population.
Matt Chat 75: Interview with Megan Gaiser and Rob Riedl of Her Interactive
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Day/Night
Clouds
Weather
Klepto has done a great job with day/night.
daynightvideo.avi
DayNightSunMoon (this one is very pretty)
As for weather, I have seen people discuss how to do rain and if I remember correctly it can be done with shaders. Do a search on it.
Some sort of working waypoint system for ai
We already have a waypoint system. See Lumooja's game code. I've forgotten what its called.
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Nice explanation Bill.
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Even animating a mouth open and closed has it's merits. Although getting it to sync to the beginning and end of a sound file looks to be a challenge.
From what I've seen, people make animations of the mouth doing the basic vowel shapes and then a plugin detects what sound is being played and sends ids to represent the shapes. The other major issue, is you need to animate expressions for the face as well, which would be a lot of work. Anyway, I can't wait till someone figures out how to automate this kind of thing.
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As much as I hate to admit this point, Josh is probably right. It sucks to admit it though. Anyways, if you show Josh a polished project that he likes, no matter who you are he'll probably work something about for some feature that you seriously need.
There is no need to ask Josh to have 'faith' in indie projects. Instead indie projects should just do our best. Then we can make arguments about our legitmacy when we have a real and polished project to show.
That makes a lot of sense.
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If players demand anything out of a game, it isn't indie anymore. Indie is the beauty of development freedom, where the maker should enjoy the game as much or more than the user.
That is your opinion and you are entitled to it. But Indies can be and are just as much professionals, as people in the big studios.
If you want to make things for yourself, or for the art, then it's fine to do whatever you like. But if you want to make a living as an Indie and some people do, you have to understand, you don't work for your own pleasure, you work for the enjoyment of your players. So if they demand things and they do quite often, you have to listen to the ones that are the most profitable to listen to, or not sell much at all.
Its all about choices and consequences.
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If the players demand lip sync then it is essential. Though if it is difficult to do or very expensive, then I wouldn't bother with it as an Indie.
Now what I would be interested in, is text to speech technology. However I have no idea what libraries are available, or how much they cost. At any rate, something like that could probably be integrated into LWs, by anyone who wants it.
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EDIT:
Another thing you can try is to hunt down people who are creating tutorials for YouTube and offer them an affiliate deal if they'll mention your stuff in one of their videos.
I bought Filter Forge because these guys recommended it:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TornadoTwins
I haven't seen this guy name drop, but it might be worth a shot.
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The Chrome engine looks like it's a lot better than LE, but how would I be able to get it if I decide to get it?
There is no where to buy it.
Usually with software if they don't put a price on it, it means ordinary users can't afford it.
By all means try to get a price though and tell us what they say.
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Unity supports only C#
Unity also supports JavaScript, and Boo. Boo is sort of like Python. Also the C# on Unity is cross platform Mono.
I don't know what the new Unity engine will be like, but I hated looking at the old one.
The other downside is the Unity Community is very big, so I found that sometimes you will get your questions answered and sometimes you will not. Also I found its not possible to get to know people in a crowd as big as that.
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If its as easy to make hard surface objects as in Tinker's spaceship video then I am sold. The only thing I don't understand is why this kind of modeling has not been standard in all 3D modelers. It looks so easy.
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I agree. A list of what frag file works with which vert file, would do a lot to help beginners.
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Thanks for explaining that Pancakes.
I understand what you said about producing high detailed normal maps from a high poly model, but what about the low poly model? Does 3D Coat convert the high poly model to low poly as well? Or do you have to do that by hand?
Also they have a picture of a spaceship here:
http://www.3d-coat.com/texture-painting/
Does that mean it can be used for more than just sculpting organic objects? Or perhaps they just imported the space ship.
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Is that using pureLIGHT maps? If so what does your mat file look like?
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I just found they have a HDK developer kit which gives you C++ access to Houdini. So it might be possible to write an sbx exporter using it.
If that fails, the source for the Blender to Torque exporter is freely available and you are allowed to modify it any way you want. A good programmer would know what to do with it.
http://projects.blender.org/frs/?group_id=95
Either way you don't really need it, if you can export objs all at once with the node editor.
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This where you can find Blended Cities. Its not finished either, but it has features that will help the artist more than Suicider.
http://jerome.le.chat.free.fr/index.php/en/download/blender/city-engine-download.html
If I didn't have any money at all, I'd definitely use Blended Cities and in the recent past I was going to use it as well. But since they dropped CityGen from $5000 to $500 for Indies and Houdini to $100/$0 for hobbyists, I think both are worth looking into for the productivity increases they'll bring.
As I said above I've decided to learn Houdini, because it has the potential to be used for more than just cities. I would like to be able to make virtually anything and with a few tweaks, after I am finished, radically change the object's appearance and it would all just work. Anyway that's what I hope will be possible with Houdini.
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Suicider is a piece of exploratory programming and isn't that useful to the artist IMO. Blended Cities is based on it and is more useful, but even then it only places existing meshes that you must build.
This is better because you can randomly generate the buildings as well as their layout and adjust the parameters to get something new each time.
And yes you are right about the culling issue, you'd have to export each obj by itself. However there might be a way to export all of the objs, that make up a scene with a single command, using those node graphs.
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It has FBX and Collada for import, as well as many geometry formats. That's a pretty good deal for free.
If you get the paid Apprentice version, it looks like you can export the entire scene to Torque.
EDIT:
The FBX is import only for the paid and free Apprentice version. You have to buy Master or Escape to get FBX export.
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Okay forget what I said before. The free version does export to several formats, but you can only export individual elements, not the whole scene and it has an unusual way of doing it. See the picture for formats:
http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/3002/houdini.png
How to export objects:
BUT - in Houdini APPRENTICE HD as opposed to Apprentice it seems you can export Geometry as ... via the network view on the right lower part of the GUI Scree. You need to select the object, double click its network node gizmo to the right, goes to lower level with name of object, right click this and save geometry.
Outputting geometry using other formats can be done in one of two ways. You can put down an output node at the end of your geometry chain and use it to save to disk or you can RMB-click on any node in the geometry chain and choose Save Geometry. There is also a geometry render output node in the output section that supports all the other formats.
The export menu is for more complex formats like FBX and Torque that are designed to handle complete scenes.
I won't comment again, until I get some confidence with it, as it looks very complicated right now.
pureLIGHT for Leadwerks
in General Discussion
Posted
It generates shadow and light maps, so the lighting is static but it is of a far higher quality, than you could get with dynamic lights. To me, the output looks like what you'd get with a ray tracer.
So it depends on what your goals are with your app, if you want to pick up objects purelight has lit and throw them around the room, it would not work.
LWs dynamic lights still works with it, but there are limitations. For instance if you are carrying a torch, the static lit object shadows will not move because they are pre-calculated. However the areas they already affect will change in brightness.
So again, you have to think carefully about what your goals are and make the necessary trade offs.
Some people create simple programs to show off architectural designs to clients. Purelight is the perfect app for this. Others want to make games where static lighting with a gorgeous ray traced look, makes their game look stunning. Purelight is perfect for this as well.
Have a look a their demo vids on Youtube to see what I'm talking about.